Rethinking Network Quality of Service in the Cloud Era

Abstract

To provide quality of service (QoS) to the users, interactive applications (video conferencing, augmented and virtual reality, online gaming, etc.) require strict guarantees from the network. However, the Internet – due to its best effort nature – does not provide any packet loss, latency, or bandwidth guarantees to the applications, which can lead to degraded application performance and frustrating user experience.

In this thesis, we revisit the long-standing problem of network QoS and propose the concept of judiciousQoS – combining the cheaper, best effort IP services with the cloud, which offers a highly reliable infrastructure and the ability to add in- network services, albeit at a higher cost.

We first conduct a measurement study of the cloud infrastructure and compare the network performance of major cloud providers with one another and against the public Internet. Using insights from our measurement study, we demonstrate the use of judicious QoS by designing and implementing ReWAN, a packet recovery service that leverages the cloud to recover from lost or delayed packets. Finally, we propose the judicious QoS framework (J-QoS), which offers a variety of cloud based services with different cost vs. performance trade-offs. J-QoS services include forwarding, caching, and coding of application streams and can meet QoS demands such as high reliability, low latency, and bandwidth guarantees.

We demonstrate the feasibility of ReWAN and other J-QoS services by: i) using measurements from multiple vantage points on the Internet, ii) analyzing pricing data in our cost model, and iii) a live deployment on a real network and cloud. We also consider case studies on how our proposed solutions work with services up and down the network stack, including Skype video conferencing, TCP-based web transfers, and cellular access networks.

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